The Village Attorney’s client is the Village, not any elected councilmember. Nobody on the council should look to the Village Attorney for political support. The advice needs to be detailed, accurate and COMPLETE. Why he didn’t ward the council off of a one-off up-or-down vote on allowing a single third-party group to erect their flag on Village property for an entire month is a mystery. Elected officeholders considering the merits of that organization’s message or mission when deciding yes or no on such a proposed flag display is a municipal sin under well-known first amendment jurisprudence (as now applied to the several states). So sometimes our Village Attorney unaccountably drops the ball. The right way to handle this? Set up a simple content-blind procedure administered by the Village Manager, with no need or opportunity for grandstanding officeholders and third party petitioners to pollute Ridgewood’s political atmosphere with obscene virtue signaling at village council meetings.

The fact that Ridgewood had no content-blind procedure in place prior to receiving the third party request to display their flag put us in a vulnerable condition that allowed for political mischief and sowed chaos, both of which are goals of practitioners of Critical Theory, and of Obama-inspired community activists who brazenly employ cynical Cloward/Piven strategies with a view toward overwhelming the normal apparatus of government. The fact that Ridgewood has not yet responded to this stimulus by devising and implementing a content-blind municipal procedure by which such third parties can obtain approval for their proposed displays reflects poorly on the members of our Village Council and on the Village Attorney. Can it be that they wish to remain vulnerable to such politically-motivated manipulation of our local system of government? If so, this is a serious problem of judgment, particularly since they should know by now how bad things can get for naive municipalities who innocently fail, or worse, stubbornly refuse to prepare themselves in advance to deal with such attacks when they come. And they will come.